It took me five years to get my driver’s license. You read that right. Five years. By the time I got it, high school freshmen were into their sophomore year of college. College freshman were into their first year of the workforce.

Why am I admitting this shameful detail about myself? Because it’s a good reminder that sometimes the path to where you want to go is full of obstacles. And whether the obstacles are internal or external — or both — and whether you’ve failed more times than you can count, you owe it to yourself to keep trying.

I convinced myself that I’d never get my driver’s license — in fact, I convinced myself I was not meant to get my driver’s license and that my getting it would cause some sort of butterfly effect catastrophe. (That said, I did get it in 2001 — the same year gas prices surged — so I may have been onto something.)

After over a dozen years of driving, I can’t picture my life without it, and it's hard to remember being unable to manage a clutch or being too paralyzed with fear to go beyond a parking lot.

Everyone has these things — these goals that they’ve picked up and then given up repeatedly. Maybe that S.O.B. known as parallel parking isn’t your stumbling block of achieving your unfulfilled long-term goals, but something is.